Voice of Russia
August 28, 2013
Attack on Syria will cause regional conflagration – Rick Rozoff
Audio
With what appears to an imminent Western military adventure and yet another act of aggression against a small country on the other side of the world, meaning what appears to be the upcoming unprovoked attack on the sovereign nation of Syria by the United States, Rick Rozoff spoke about the military buildup and the reasons for the West’s continued meddling in the Middle East.
Robles: Hello. This is John Robles. I’m speaking with. Rick Rozoff, the owner and manager of the Stop Nato website and mailing list. Hello, Sir.
Rozoff: Hello, John. How are you?
Robles: Not too good in light of the events that are currently taking place. As I’m sure you’re aware…
Rozoff: I think it is a very dramatic and I fear a tragic moment at which we are speaking.
Robles: And it seems like there is very little we can do or that anybody can do to influence what has apparently been in the works and a plan by those geopolitical…
Rozoff: Mad men
Robles: Mad men
Rozoff: … or evil geniuses that constitute the foreign policy elite of the United States and other western nations to complete your thought, John.
Robles: Thank you.
Rozoff: Yes. That’s exactly what I fear is the case.
Robles: Can you tell us a little bit on the military hardware aspect of this. There are not too many reports out there on that.
Rozoff: We have to keep in mind that until the people of the Mediterranean basin demand that the US pick up and leave its military, the US is always…the Pentagon is always in position to strike any nation in or near the Mediterranean Sea. But what we do know is that currently assigned to the Sixth Fleet, permanently stationed in the Mediterranean, are no fewer than four guided missile destroyers that are in the eastern part of the Mediterranean even as we speak, including one which played an instrumental role in the opening salvo of cruise missile attacks against Libya in March of 2011.
These are what are referred to in US military parlance as Arleigh Burke class destroyers. In other words they are the type that will be equipped to carry interceptor missiles, Standard Missile-3 interceptors of the sort that are part of the US missile shield that has been deployed in and around Europe and in the Middle East. We know for a fact there are four of those.
There are reports that at least one and possibly two US submarines, and these are the USS Florida and USS Georgia, are deployed off the eastern Mediterranean, each of which…by the way, the Arleigh Burke destroyers I mentioned, the four of them, are capable of carrying 70 missiles each. These include cruise as well as other missiles, but the submarines are far more deadly, far more lethal. Each of them is equipped to carry 150 Tomahawk cruise missiles.
One of these two I mention – USS Florida – was, you know, fired something in the neighborhood of a 100 missiles in the attack against Libya, you know also in the Mediterranean, of course, two and a half years ago. So this is what the US has in play.
Robles: Sir, they’re planning to use Tomahawks on Syria, is that correct?
Rozoff: This is what they used of course against Libya two and a half years ago, what they used against Yugoslavia in 1999, it was used against Iraq in 2003. You know, again, it’s a coward’s way of waging warfare. You don’t endanger pilots or fixed wing aircraft by flying strikes into the country. You simply fire a cruise missile.
It has devastating effect, of course. And you don’t endanger the life of any US serviceman, which in a way we have to hark back to the war against Libya again – 2011 – and the fact that after 60 days of waging war, unprovoked war, against a defenseless nation of some six million people, according to the War Power Resolution, introduced in the US Congress in the early 1970s, President Barack Obama was obligated to come before Congress and present his case for a continuation of the war. He arrogantly refused to do so,stating in his estimate it was not a war because US military personnel were not in harm’s way.
So you can wreak as much devastation, material and human, as one wants to against a smaller defenseless country, but if US servicemen aren’t in danger themselves and it doesn’t constitute a war then the president of the United States (commander-in-chief of the US armed forces), in his opinion, doesn’t feel obligated even to explain to the US Congress what he is doing. So this is what we are talking about with Syria right now.
We also have to remember that Syria and Lebanon really now are the only countries in the entire Mediterranean region that have not become US military partners, US military stooges for the most part, and that each new country that falls into the orbit of the Pentagon becomes a military base for attacks on other countries.
I’ve read reports today that the British military bases in Cyprus are being … you know are seein gwarplanes coming in. We know the Souda naval base in Crete in Greece could be used for any attack against Syria. With a change in government in Cyprus at the beginning of this year we can see an even more compliant client regime willing to do the US’s dirty work.
Robles: What have you heard about Iraq, there were some statements by Iraqi officials that they were against the use of their airspace for an invasion of Syria? And then I’d like you to get into what your views on the after effects of what this invasion is going to cause.
Rozoff: It’s standard operating procedure, if you will, for countries not to openly acknowledge that they’re granting the US and its allies the right to use their air space to launch attacks. When we’re talking about the cruise missile attacks, in large part depending on where the vessel, whether a surface vessel or a submarine, is firing them, of necessity Syria has a fairly short coast line compared to Libya and to other countries. And we could count on the fact that a goodly number of the cruise missiles being fired inside Syria would have to pass over the territory of other countries: Jordan, Iraq, come most immediately to mind.
But of course, if there was plausible deniability, and they simply don’t acknowledge that…Saudi Arabia is another…that the US is firing missiles over their territory then no one is the wiser I suppose. But, in the long run, the regime that was put into power and is beholden to the United States and Baghdad says publicly and what it does in fact I think are two different things. And until there’s a larger community of nations in the world ready to stand up for peace and against armed barbarism, then no one country is going to say no to Washington for fear if nothing else it will be the next target.
And I think if you want a parallel with what’s going on right now, you’ll look at that decade that began, say, with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and China in 1931 and it included attack after attack on country after country by the Axis powers, by imperial Japan, by fascist Italy and by Nazi Germany, which culminated in 1940 with nations like Norway and Denmark and Greece, and Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, France overrun by these hordes of militarists. For ten years the world saw this naked aggression going on and the League of Nations could not or would not do anything about it.
Robles: That’s what the United States is doing right now and the United Nations which was organized and formed to stop that from happening ever again has done nothing.
Rozoff: It is worse than has done nothing; it is in fact a complicit partner in the arrangement. The Russian government amongst others has been warning over the last 24 hours that any exacerbation of the conflict in Syria by internationalizing it, that is by having major Western military powers and their Persian Gulf allies launch military attacks inside Syria is only going to inflame, exacerbate and worsen the situation, it’s going to cause a massive conflagration not only in Syria but in the surrounding area.
Countries like Iraq, Jordan, Turkey and others are going to be pulled into this maelstrom, into this vortex, inevitably. And what we are seeing now is maybe a culmination of the decades-long so-called broader Middle East initiative of the United States which is simply to remake the political map from the nation of Mauritania on the Atlantic coast to Kazakhstan on the Chinese border and the US is going to throw this entire area into turmoil in furtherance of its own selfish and for the most part undisclosed geopolitical objectives.
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